Great, thanks a lot, gposil. In the meantime as a kludge I was considering something rather inelegant. Since the main advantages of apt over PPM that I can see are 1) better dependency resolution and 2) easy access to new repositories, I can keep an empty dpupsave into which I would, when necessary, install apt, run it in "--download-only" mode, and copy over the debs for installation with PPM to my main system. Possibly any frugal installers desperate for apt could do the same when they really need it... (I would just do a full install but I can't, as I need my Puppy to be flash drive based and full installs don't work on USB devices).

I would say this qualifies as "protip". _________________Tahr Pup 6 on desktop, Lucid 3HD on lappie

APT/Synaptic was never going to be a happy match with a pupsave type environment. It creates large database entries and keeps a copy of every file you download/install, even if you later uninstall it. You can remove some of the bloat by going to /var/cache/apt and deleting the deb files from there, but it sort of defeats the purpose behind APT, ie re-installs and filesystem fixes.

I said from the outset that I thought that it would really only be viable on a full HDD install, more and more testers are discovering for themselves why I said that...(unless you can put up with large and fast growing pupsave files)

Thank you Guy for that explanation.
I somehow missed the message about FULL install.
In any case it's a nice addition and hope you keep it in the stream of thought you had on it.
Bernard_________________Time savers:
Find packages in a snap and install using Puppy Package Manager (Menu).
Consult Wikka
Use peppyy's puppysearch

Great, thanks a lot, gposil. In the meantime as a kludge I was considering something rather inelegant. Since the main advantages of apt over PPM that I can see are 1) better dependency resolution and 2) easy access to new repositories, I can keep an empty dpupsave into which I would, when necessary, install apt, run it in "--download-only" mode, and copy over the debs for installation with PPM to my main system. Possibly any frugal installers desperate for apt could do the same when they really need it... (I would just do a full install but I can't, as I need my Puppy to be flash drive based and full installs don't work on USB devices).

I would say this qualifies as "protip".

Another way which seems to work is moving the /var/cache/apt* directories out of the pupsave and softlinking to the new destination. Didn't see any troubles with this approach yet.

* First you have to extract the apt_synaptic-dpup.pet (i used pet2tgz and then tar -xvvzf ).
* Then apply my script on that <directory>
* Then mksquashfs4 <directory> apt_synaptic-dpup.sfs4.sfs
* mount a directory outside of the savefile for keeping the apt repository data under /mnt/repositories
* sfs_linker apt_synaptic-dpup.sfs4.sfs
* apt-RUNMEFIRST # to initialise the apt repo - do this just once
* apt-get update
* use your apt

The sfs doesn't work via BootManager. Note, I also had some problems inbetween with automatically sfs_link'ing the sfs, so I sfs_link(er) that manually ATM every run i need it.

Thanks for the great idea with the apt sfs and script. But there seem to be a number of bugs - sorry I can't directly debug the script myself, would give it a shot but getting screwed on time...

So this is what I did:

1. Made an empty 400M image file and mounted it on /mnt/repositories
2. Expanded apt_synaptic-dpup.pet as instructed
3. Saved your script at flugwelpe-apt.sh in my root directory and then ran it on the directory where I had expanded apt_synaptic-dpup
4. Things semed to run ok though nothing had been created in my /mnt/repositories file
5. Did a mksquashfs4 on it
6. Installed SFS Linker pet and rebooted
7. Ran sfs_linker on the image file - got a long string of errors, but it seemed to link ok, i.e. apt-get command executed and /mnt/apt_synaptic-dpup.sfs looked ok on a brief inspection
8. Mounted my image file on /mnt/repositories again
9. Ran apt-RUNMEFIRST and got these errors:

Code:

cp: cannot stat `/var/apt_initial_dirs/cache/apt/*': No such file or directory
cp: cannot stat `/var/apt_initial_dirs/cache/apt-build/*': No such file or directory
cp: cannot stat `/var/apt_initial_dirs/lib/apt/*': No such file or directory

Which is very odd since all those directories seem to exist and have things in them.

Then ran apt-get update and get:

Code:

E: Could not open lock file /var/lib/apt/lists/lock - open (2 No such file or directory)
E: Unable to lock the list directory

Traced the symbolic links to a directory in /mnt/repositories that doesn't seem to exist, so created it, but getting the same error.

That copy command had wrong quotes so it wouldn't copy the right files to initialise the repository. I edited the script in my previous post to fix it (but didn't try it with a fresh install).
You could also just remove the quotes in /usr/sbin/apt-RUNMEFIRST and run that again.

shankargopal wrote:

...
3. Saved your script at flugwelpe-apt.sh in my root directory and then ran it on the directory where I had expanded apt_synaptic-dpup
4. Things semed to run ok though nothing had been created in my /mnt/repositories file

Thats okay, /mnt/repositories/apt is initialized when you run apt-RUNMEFIRST (i.e. after install).

shankargopal wrote:

...
8. Mounted my image file on /mnt/repositories again

Not sure what you mean with 'image file', but if its the place you want to store the apt cache etc., then its fine

shankargopal wrote:

9. Ran apt-RUNMEFIRST and got these errors:

Code:

cp: cannot stat `/var/apt_initial_dirs/cache/apt/*': No such file or directory
cp: cannot stat `/var/apt_initial_dirs/cache/apt-build/*': No such file or directory
cp: cannot stat `/var/apt_initial_dirs/lib/apt/*': No such file or directory

Which is very odd since all those directories seem to exist and have things in them.

Yeah, it should have been '/var/apt_initial_dirs/cache/apt-build/'* instead of '/var/apt_initial_dirs/cache/apt-build/*'. The single quotes prevented the * from being expanded to all the files in the directory. If you dont have whitespace in the path, they are not needed anyway.

shankargopal wrote:

Then ran apt-get update and get:

Code:

E: Could not open lock file /var/lib/apt/lists/lock - open (2 No such file or directory)
E: Unable to lock the list directory

Traced the symbolic links to a directory in /mnt/repositories that doesn't seem to exist, so created it, but getting the same error.
...

yip, you need the apt structure like the apt-RUNMEFIRST copies it there.

Thanks flugwelpe will give it a shot. Incidentally, there seems to be some other bug at work as well - the sfs linker seems to have randomly linked all kinds of files to the /mnt/apt_synaptic-dpup.sfs directory, including /usr/bin/X, /usr/bin/python etc. In fact the mess was so bad that this morning I had to just start with a fresh save file to get things running again. Not sure if this indicates a problem with the restructuring of the sfs file? given that am a little wary of retrying now, got a lot of work to do and doing a save file wipe again would not be fun

Thanks flugwelpe will give it a shot. Incidentally, there seems to be some other bug at work as well - the sfs linker seems to have randomly linked all kinds of files to the /mnt/apt_synaptic-dpup.sfs directory, including /usr/bin/X, /usr/bin/python etc.

Yeah, the sfs is not cleaned up at all. There is a full python and a full perl inside. Not sure, what is really needed. I should remove the /usr/bin/X at least in my script.

The original stuff should be back when you unlink the sfs file, AFAIK.

shankargopal wrote:

given that am a little wary of retrying now, got a lot of work to do and doing a save file wipe again would not be fun

Thanks again for all the work

Welcome
Just know that this all of this is pre-alpha so you should keep backups

The original stuff should be back when you unlink the sfs file, AFAIK.

Tried that, no luck. But maybe that was my save file's fault.

flugwelpe wrote:

shankargopal wrote:

given that am a little wary of retrying now, got a lot of work to do and doing a save file wipe again would not be fun

Thanks again for all the work

Welcome
Just know that this all of this is pre-alpha so you should keep backups

I had one, or I would have been committing hara kiri at this very moment... but it's a pain nonetheless to reinstall your software and settings etc. Will give it a shot again with your bugfix soon hopefully...

Apt-get more than synaptic, should I proceed with the .pet install of apt_synaptic-dpup.pet for 484beta4?

This would still be the place to get it?
http://dpup.org/test/dpup482beta5-2.6.30.5/addons/

Additionally, do I need to install any deps in order apt-get should work? I currently only have Debian repos enabled in the PPM in order to get me started, the end goal however is to run Puppy solely using apt-get/synaptic, and avoiding the PPM, or .pets.

Okay, so I went ahead with the apt/synaptic .pet install -- that was fine. So far I've only been executing apt-get installs at the cli, where downloads go off fine, but will run into these common errors, whatever I choose to install -- here conky:

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